China's Obsession With Secrecy Often Trips Up Its Own Goals

May 03, 1993|By Uli Schmetzer, Chicago Tribune.

BEIJING — After a Philippine official mentioned last week that Chinese Premier Li Peng was in the hospital, it took the Chinese government three days of verbal hiccuping to decide what information to feed the country's 1.1 billion residents.

Philippine President Fidel Ramos and his spokesman, Rodolfo Reyes, were in China on a state visit last Monday when it was announced that Ramos' meeting with the premier, scheduled for that day, had been canceled.

The reason, Reyes said, was because Li was ill and in the hospital.

A half-hour after Reyes' announcement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wu Jianmin broke out in nervous giggles when asked by a foreign journalist if the Chinese premier had, indeed, been hospitalized.

"The premier has a cold," Wu finally muttered.

When pressed, he added: "It's just a common cold. People do have colds these days."

But why would Li be taken to a hospital with a common cold?

Wu giggled some more and said it was the premier's right to have a cold, like everyone else, and that was that.

The incident illustrated how secretive China's political establishment remains despite its much flaunted Open Door policy.

It also showed how the country's rigid Communist chain of command is paralyzed by the fear of underlings unwilling to release information without a go-ahead from the highest authority.

Worse, the system often not only proves counterproductive to current policy but gives substance to rumors that could be easily avoided by frankness.

The best examples of official rigidity are seen at the Foreign Ministry's weekly news briefings, where spokesmen trot out cliches to describe a variety of situations.

"The report does not square with the facts" may mean just that. Perhaps instead of 24 victims in an accident there were only 23. But officials don't clarify discrepencies.

The phrase "sheer fabrication" indicates that officials will deny an accusation until doomsday.

"I have not come across this report" inevitably means "I have not been told the authorized reply to this."

The phrase "groundless reports" means there might be a grain of truth, but there is no official desire to illuminate the world on the subject.

Once a course is determined, officials stubbornly cling to it.

The same night as Reyes' announcement, the official New China News Agency dutifully reported: "Premier Li Peng has a cold."

Other official media loyally repeated Wu's diplomatic cold theory for the next 24 hours.

Even when Foreign Minister Qian Qichen finally admitted to a handful of European correspondents that Li was in a hospital, he stuck to the diagnosis: "He has a cold."

On the third day, spokesman Wu explained it all with a mollifying "The premier has a bad cold."

Western diplomats said they were told through the Chinese grapevine that Li has pneumonia.

The government's secrecy often backfires. It also wreaks havoc with Hong Kong's Stock Exchange, where the slightest hiccup in China causes quotes to see-saw.

When Russian President Boris Yeltsin described patriarch Deng Xiaoping as "ill" during a visit to Beijing last year, the stock quotes in Hong Kong plummeted amid fear of chaos over a succession to "The Red Emperor."

Li, 64, the stodgy hard-line premier is associated with the brutal crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The only candidate nominated, Li was reappointed to the premiership in March by the National People's Congress (NPC).

However, an unprecedented 10 percent of delegates cast votes against him or abstained, a phenomenon in the NPC which, as China's equivalent to a parliament, habitually approves the party's nominations without dissent.

Li's illness forced him to cancel a swing through the new Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, sparking lively speculation about his political future.

Many Western analysts note that the premier hasn't been punished or removed for being slow to embrace Deng's free-market reforms and the decision to allow government ministries and departments to branch out into private enterprise.

It was only late last year that Li made the almost obligatory pilgrimage to China's Special Economic Zones in the south, the locomotives of the nation's economy.

There, he dutifully hailed Deng's policies, but perhaps too late.

A Moscow-trained engineer with a lifelong loyalty to the Marxist idea of central control, Li is seen by reformers as the last pillar of the old system and feared as the hatchetman who will hold them accountable if the economy sours.

"A lot of people would breath easier if Li was gone," said an Asian diplomat. "But dropping him would serve notice the reformers are in complete control.

"That would mean there has been a revolution inside the party and I don't see any signs of that."